


Aftermath

by GalaxyBrownies



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: After DR3, Cuddling, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, I love them so much hhhhhhhh, Kisses, Multi, Nightmares, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Souda doesn’t do much even though I love him to bits, i torture gundham slightly, reader was part of class 77
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-01
Updated: 2019-03-01
Packaged: 2019-11-07 08:51:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17957432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GalaxyBrownies/pseuds/GalaxyBrownies
Summary: Because how can you go through all of that without some mental scarring?A.K.A Gundham and Reader mutually help eachother heal.





	Aftermath

Gundham was the first of you three to cry out in his sleep.

You hadn’t fallen asleep yet, it was still difficult to compel your mind to calm down and accept the hours of nightmares that were about to follow. The air was warm and sticky on the island, barely masked by the thin layer of cool air conditioner your cottage was supplied with. Your consciousness allowed you to hear the whimpers coming from his direction. Honestly, you were surprised it wasn’t Kazuichi who screamed in his sleep first, but he was snoring away, drool gathering on the sheets below his mouth. You were facing towards him, and he was faced towards the wall.

You kiss the back of Kazuichi’s head and turn to Gundham, the person who needed you more right now. His face is scrunched up like he’s concentrating on something, and his eyebrows are twitching only slightly. Every so often he makes a small noise, and it’s vulnerable, and scared. You know how he feels.

You wrap an arm around him and snuggle into his chest. As if by instinct, his arm goes around you in return, and squeezes you so tightly that it’s almost painful. You were fine with it. 

When his whimpers begin to turn into full-on screams, muffled in the thick, soft cloth of his scarf, you run his fingers through the hair that was loose around his shoulders and whisper to him. You’d never done this before, comforting someone in their sleep. Before you’d met Gundham and Kazuichi, you’d never been close enough to someone to do so. You were glad you met them. It meant they wouldn’t have to go through this alone.

You whisper words of encouragement and reassurance, and soft, meaningless sounds that don’t do much but soothe frayed nerves. You tell him you love him.

He mumbles in his sleep. To be fair, you’d been told that you did that too, when your obnoxious snoring finally subsided. In happier times he’d mumbled about Hell and Lords of Darkness and Demons, but now it was all about the unspeakable horrors of the past few years. Whether it was the events at school, or what you’d all done as the Ultimate Despair, or what had happened in the simulation, nobody from Class 77 was free from a whole bunch of trauma. You weren’t exempt, and neither was Kazuichi, and neither was Gundham.

So when he starts almost crying as he sleeps, and shakes in your arms, you do your best to hold him even tighter and shush him even more insistently. The storm would pass, and you’d be okay again. Everyone would be Okay again. That was the hope, anyway. 

You were tired, enough that your eyelids are drooping, but you knew that sleep was going to happen to you some time or another. You could only stay up for so many nights before your body caved in and forced you to catch up on your rest. You knew that from experience. Sleep was a necessary evil from time to time, even if it left you sweating and thrashing the covers off of your legs, and being woken up with one of the two rubbing your back soothingly while the other pours you a glass of milk. 

You don’t want to leave Gundham alone long enough to get him a drink. He didn’t even really like milk, even though it didn’t fall under his ‘I won’t consume anything that was obtained by harming an animal’ clause. When his arms start to raise and lower themselves in jerky motions, you finally shake his shoulder to wake him up from his night terrors. His eyes crack open slightly, a brief pause in his muffled screams, before the pause ends and he’s clinging to you. Gundham Tanaka was absolutely not the type to cling. And yet…

You squeeze him, allowing for a moment to sink your face deeper into the plush scarf around his neck. He rests his chin on the top of your head while his breathing evens out. When both of you are comfortable and he’s more awake and aware, you pull back and examine his well-being. 

His hair is loose at his shoulders, and slightly messy from sleep. He’s looking at you with a soft expression, one you’ve grown fond of seeing since you woke up from the simulation after him. He and Kazuichi had both been waiting at your capsule, it was all very romantic. Of course, waking up that late meant that you had the extra trauma of death, but you’d be fine as long as you had them.

He looks okay. “Do you wanna talk about it?” You mumble, trying not to wake up Kazuichi. He slept like a rock, usually, but he’d had his fidgety nights.

Gundham hesitates, then nods. “Somewhere else,” he whispers, eyeing Kazuichi, whose accumulating drool was reaching record breaking amounts. You smile, taking one of his hands. There was a time when he wouldn’t allow any of this, no touching him at all. He’d been convinced you’d die, or so he said. You were glad he got past that, his skin was warm and soft.

It’s a few minutes before you’ve gathered yourselves enough to leave, but you pull on your best fuzzy socks (it wasn’t like the way to the hotel restaurant wasn’t paved or anything) and leave alongside him. Gundham must really be in a state if he’s willing to leave the cottage with his pajamas on and his hair undone. It’s concerning.

When you arrive at the hotel restaurant, which was so similar to the one in the simulation besides the lack of a constant feast put out at the tables, you pour both of you a glass of orange juice and sit down at a table in the corner.

You brush his fingertips with yours when he struggles to make eye contact. “You okay?”

Gundham grimaces, but nods. You understood, you’d had your fair share of being physically fine but mentally in turmoil. The things you’d done… the things that had been done to you…

“I dreamt of what happened before,” he states in a tired voice. You cringe, you know it’s a bad time for Gundham if he wasn’t putting on his melodramatic air of being the ‘Prince of Darkness’, or whatever. You’d grown to be able to understand the way he spoke, but at the moment you didn’t need to be able to.

“I’ve done that too,” you reply, taking a sip of your drink. You put it back down and nudge it around with your fingertips. “I said some terrible things to you and Kazuichi.” So terrible that when you got your memories back, you’d insisted on calling Gundham and Kazuichi by their last names once again. You hadn’t felt like you deserved to call them more affectionately by their first.

Gundham’s gaze shoots to yours, and holds it. “We’ve been over this,” he says forcefully. “It wasn’t your fault.”

It still felt like your fault. You remembered it clear as crystal, and as easily as if you’d made the choice to say such terrible things yourself. It had all been in the name of despair. Despair in them for the person they loved being so cruel, and despair in yourself for watching yourself hurt the people you loved, and despair in the world when losing them made you cruel and easy to hurt others. You shiver. You don’t know how you became like that, usually your strangely high levels of empathy made it physically hurt when you made someone unhappy. Maybe that was why you had done it. Despair.

But this wasn’t about you, this was about Gundham. 

“Let’s not get into it now,” you decide. “We came here to talk about you.”

Gundham looks like he wants to protest, but doesn’t, instead sighing and scratching at the back of his head. “I was not exactly kind to the animals I trained,” he admits with a wince. “And I abandoned my Four Dark Devas of Destruction.”

Somehow, they’d been found after the simulation. They weren’t unscathed, Cham-P had been dead and Maga-Z was missing an ear, but the sight of his old hamsters (sans one) had been a huge comforter. A sign that maybe things could go back to how they were, or at least close to it.

“Was that what you were dreaming about?”

“No.” He frowns. “You know, it’s actually rather difficult to recall specific events that took place inside of that infernal program.”

You nod. “Yeah, I have a general knowledge of what happened, but a lot of it is sort of… blurry? I know I have the important bits, at least.”

“The ones who escaped the program without falling into the coma we did remember it in a much more clear fashion.”

“Do they?” That was news to you. “I was under the impression that retaining their personalities was just as much of a miracle for them as it was for us.”

“It was. I guess we all were under the influence of luck, then.”

“Komaeda is probably so pissed,” you laugh nervously. You didn’t like to think about Komaeda very much, or interact with him in any meaningful way. It reminded you too much of how you’d died in the sims. It had hurt more than anything else you’ve ever felt. Then… it was black. And there was nothing. For eternity. 

And then, you woke up.

“So...what did you dream about, then?” You ask, tracing the rim of your cup with your finger.

“...Do you remember that space between life and death? When you died?” Gundham pauses. “It is probably ridiculous, but that was what plagued my sleep.”

You take his hand as it rests on the table, interlacing your fingers. “I don’t think that’s ridiculous at all. It was cold. And I couldn’t put two words together in a thought. I couldn’t really call it existence. It felt like it went on forever, but apparently it was only a couple weeks.” 

While your other boyfriend was very good at sympathizing with everything else, this was one subject that Kazuichi couldn’t relate to. He’d survived the simulation, but for those who’d died, the memory of what came after was a uniting factor. Even if your memories of the simulation were fuzzy, your memory of what came after death was clear as crystal. How ironic.

“It felt like I was being erased from existence,” Gundham states in a horrified tone. His grip on your hand tightens. “Like nobody would remember me.”

“I understand,” you smile sympathetically. “I felt the same.”

“How is it possible for something to hurt, but not hurt at the exact same time? That’s how it felt.”

That was actually a good way of summing it up. You had existed, and yet not existed. You’d felt, and not felt. You had been nothing more than a ghost in the code, a leftover blip of yourself. You had no hope. 

And then you were back. And sensation was painful, because how can you exist but not exist in such a dark, quiet place for so long, almost eternity, without growing used to it? How can you return to normalcy without everything being too bright, too loud? 

It was almost easier being nothing but a memory in the code.

“I… don’t know.” Your reply takes a while, but is ultimately anticlimactic.

Gundham nods. “It was so...uncertain. And then it was over. And we woke up.” He glances towards the side before meetings eyes with you again. “I woke up,” he corrects himself. “You were still…” the sentence doesn’t need finishing, and he allows it to trail off into nothingness. If he weren’t across a table from you, you’d be hugging him so tightly he couldn’t breathe. It still didn’t seem like a bad idea. “Kazuichi remembered our school days when I woke up. It came back to me slowly.”

It was still tripping you out, hearing Gundham speak without his usual tone and role. Even when he was in the throes of despair, even when he was facing execution, he’d never relinquished his way of speaking. It felt foreign.

“You remembered that we’d been dating,” you finish for him, and he nods. 

“Yes. And then it was even more painful to see you asleep. You’d died last, even after Komaeda.” But before Chiaki, you think to yourself, but maybe she didn’t count because she didn’t have a body to come back to. “It was so long before he woke up, and even longer before you did as well. World Ender definitely took his time with your rehabilitation.”

That secondary simulation had been interesting, to say the least. It was as if you’d never been invited to Hope’s Peak at all. In the sim, it hadn’t even existed. You’d just been an average high school student in your home country. You wondered why. From what you’d heard about Komaeda’s experience, he was still at the prestigious school when he went through the program. 

You hadn’t known what you were missing school-wise, in the simulation. Your life in it was drearily boring. You glance at Gundham before focusing on your hand joined with his.

It was lonely, too.

You don’t know how you went through the school years in the simulation without them. Your perception of time had been augmented, the few months you spent in the rehabilitation sim felt like years of schooling. You don’t know how you stayed afloat without Kazuichi’s energy, his humor. Without Gundham’s fantastical stories and larger than life persona, and the way he was like a rock for you to lean on. You been so alone, and you’d thought it was normal.

Gundham squeezes your hand, bringing your attention back to him. He smiles. You smile back. It’s suddenly very quiet in the restaurant.

“Thanks for joining me,” you say, standing up while still holding his hand. “I know you were the one to suggest we leave the cottage, but I think… I think we both needed this.”

“Ah, of course, my faerie. Would a Dark Lord of such great power deign to part from his queen just short of the midnight hour? Perish the thought. It is with great honor that I mend the tears in your heart, for nothing warms the dark one’s soul like the sunshine in your smile.”

You can’t help the grin on your face when you notice that he’s returned to his usual patterns of speech. He certainly sounded more like himself. You reach up and ruffle his hair, and he has to bite back a laugh and swat your hand away.

“Mortals should not presume to touch the unkempt hair of the Dark Lord of Ice,” Gundham warns. “Until it’s time of splendor, the damage it could cause you is indescribable.”

You raise a brow. “It’s just hair,” you protest. Sure, it was a little greasy, and he probably needed a shower in the morning, but it was nice to touch it when it wasn’t full of hair gel and impossible to run your fingers through.

“Pfft,” Gundham rolls his eyes. “Magic hair,” He corrects. You’re sent into a fit of giggles. 

When the laughter subsides, you gesture for Gundham to stoop down to your level, and surprise him with a kiss between his eyes when he does. He blinks in surprise, pausing for only a second before laughing in the way he only does when he’s really taken off guard. It’s more real than his dark lord persona’s laugh, and you love it. You peck his face with many small kisses, over his cheeks and nose and forehead, finally ending with a more drawn out kiss on his lips.

He cups your face with his hand and leans into it for a few moments, before you pull away and hug him tightly, face buried in his shoulder. 

Life on this island really wasn’t too bad. Not too bad at all.


End file.
